Not really. After working with CentOS (RIP) for a half decade, that Firefox version was so out of date I was practically in diapers when it came out. Getting the latest version of Firefox was such a pain that my org didn’t bother even if it would have given us some niceties.
LTS and other “enterprise” distros don’t push the latest version precisely because of dependencies.
That was not my experience. The classes I was required to take were technical in nature. While I was required to take electives, these could be pretty much anything from computer science to English to foreign policy. The only power dynamics I studied were between nation states.